Center for Public Justice Wins Major Grant

March-April 1996

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Center for Public Justice has been awarded a major grant by the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment to launch a new project on government's relationship to Christian social ministries. The two-year initiative, which is an outgrowth of the Center's Welfare Responsibility Inquiry, will examine current government relations with religious charities, clarify the constitutional guidelines for the relationship, and propose the best ways for government to uphold religious social services.

The leader of the new project is Stanley Carlson-Thies, who directed the Welfare Responsibility Inquiry and is now a Senior Fellow of the Center. James Skillen, the Center's Executive Director, is on the project's steering board. The other board members are Stephen Monsma (Pepperdine University), a key analyst of government policy toward religious charities; Carl Esbeck (University of Missouri Law School), one of the foremost constitutional scholars on project issues; Amy Sherman, author of the forthcoming Restorers of Streets to Dwell In: Effective Church-based Ministry Among the Poor; Serge Duss, a director of government relations for World Vision with extensive contacts on Capitol Hill and in the nonprofit sector; and Tim Ritchie, a consultant and lawyer who was formerly on the staff of the Center for Urban Missions, a Christian community development organization in Birmingham, Alabama.

The project is built around two workshops that will bring together ministry leaders, policy experts, scholars, and legal authorities. Two books are planned, one on church/state constitutional issues and the other on the policy and practice of government cooperation with religious charities. The project will expand considerably the Center's already extensive network of contacts with Christian social ministries, scholars, and policy makers. Thus it will allow the Center to assist Christian and other religious social ministries that seek guidance for their interactions with government as well as legislators in Congress and around the nation who are looking for ways that government can support faith-based service providers.

These days there is great enthusiasm, here in Washington as well as in many states, for enlisting private and religious charities in the fight against poverty as replacements for ineffective government welfare programs. Although the idea of revitalizing the role of private and religious charities has become very popular, not much concentrated work has been done on either the complex constitutional issues or the very practical details of implementing various kinds of cooperative relationships. What is the appropriate relationship between government and the religious social sector? Isn't it unconstitutional for government to turn to private religious groups to provide social services? Isn't it dangerous for Christian organizations to get too close to government by accepting public funding? Is there a way to expand cooperation between government and Christian social ministries without threatening the spiritual integrity of the Christian groups? These are precisely the kinds of questions the new project will seek to answer.

—The Editors